Disruptive Proactivity

Because this has just driven me insane for an hour or so, until finding the random paragraphs needed. In case you’re googling the same problem 🙂

The instructions in the “Creating a Table of Contents” section in the Scrivener manual are right; but not entirely well structured.

For Table of Contents creation, you firstly want the section which talks about Edit > “Copy Special” > “Copy Documents as ToC” is right (briefly, select the bits you want in the binder, then press that button, then paste in the stuff that’s now on the clipboard).

However, that only creates a set of links. When you save as word/RTF, and open it in Word, only placeholder question marks appear in the document. To replace those placeholders with the actual page numbers or whatever, you need to press the print menu to generate a print preview. Word will then calculate page numbers and replace the placeholders appropriately.

Hopefully putting this here will save someone else the 90 minutes that finding those 3 paragraphs in the manual took (and figuring out what to look for). It was obvious after a full reading of chapter 22 of the manual (entitled ” Creating a Table of Contents”). Don’t stop reading when it starts talking about LaTeX; the word stuff is after that (normally I’d approve, but this time, it was annoying).